Should you be able to support a family of 4 working 34 hours a week as a Walmart cashier?

Recently saw an article decrying the fact that nationally, the average Walmart front end employee works 34 hours per week at $14.46 per hour which amounts to ~$25k tc, and is below the poverty line for a family of 4.

This made me reflect. Should working 34 hrs per week as a cashier be enough to support a family of 4? Is that a reasonable expectation? If not, is it reasonable to expect people to move their career beyond that level prior to starting a family? What is our societal expectation?

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The alternative would be to wait until you're past the min wage level to start a family. Our social expectation would then be that if you're working a job that a high schooler can do on their summer break, you're probably not in a financial position to support an family of 4.

That's one alternative, but not the only one. There is significant value to society in people having more kids and having them earlier so another solution is generous tax funded child support.

That at least doesn't make companies pay for what amounts to a national priority.

I probably voted the same as you in the poll but reached a different solution. I don't think Walmart should be made to overpay for jobs. I think society as a whole does face an existential threat if we don't get the birth rate back up.

We are not getting rid of adults working minimum wage jobs anytime soon. In the meantime, I wouldn't want the children to suffer because of that. I can get behind a lot of restrictions on having children, but a minimum TC for having children is unacceptable in principle.

Can you give me an example? I see more societies that suffer from poverty and end up killing everything around them, including them. We don't have resources to feed everyone, specially if we keep killing animals for food.

We actually have the resources to feed everyone. Every time somebody predicts that we will run out of some resource we always find a way around it. All the way back to Malthus technology keeps on finding ways around what seem like obvious limits.

Anyway high birth rate is a third world problem. Developed nations have a low birth rate problem.

1. 34 hour jobs are not the choice of employees; it is either s shift/staffing decision (if I want to be generous and assume neutral intent) or a way to prevent employees from qualifying for certain benefits.

2. Cashiers work harder than people making lots of money. Low-paid jobs are de-skilled in order to be replaceable, they are not “easy”.

These jobs can be hard and you get 0 slack for any regular human things like snacking or going to the bathroom or having a cold. Think about this the next time you work from home, chat with coworker casually, use your phone to message friends, or take a piss without having to beg your manager or endanger your employment in order to do so.

3. Most importantly, jobs are not rewards for your skills or merit or talent... they only exist to make money for investors and whatnot. It’s idiotic self-flattery for well-paid workers and a social myth that jobs are some kind of reflection of inherent qualities.

Maybe the question should be: is it reasonable for the Waltons to become the richest family in the world by making the lives of thousands and thousands of people in the US and China austere and miserable?

Well the point of carrot is to feed someone. (Otherwise that carrot might as well not exist.) When you have more donkeys than carrots, you need to prioritize somehow. You are not allowed to create a prioritization policy that disincentivizes farmers from growing carrots, because then everyone will be worse off in a world without carrots.

Carrot is a reward for a donkey, right? So that was my analogy. Because when you lead a donkey with a carrot, the point isn’t the reward, but to get labor from the donkey.

You seem to be arguing that jobs exist to reward people for their skills. I do not believe this claim has any valid empirical connection to how jobs actually function in modern society. Rather, jobs are created in order to get people to do something that will be profitable for investors.

A company dosn’t hire a skilled artisan to work on an assembly line and pay them more because they have more skills and knowledge... they pay them the same as unskilled labor because all the artisan production has been replaced by low-skilled factory work so the artisan has no other choice.

Jobs are not there for us... they exist only to make money for the company.

I interpreted carrots as minimum necessity for subsistence, for a donkey.

A job is a transaction. No transaction will take place if both sides don't benefit. You are talking about employer but missing the employee. Short of coercion, you can't get an employee to accept a job if he didn't benefit from it.

Reminder that EllisDee is a Marxist. They will never see an employer as a benevolent figure. The Marxist attitude is that the employer or investor always has ulterior, evil, and greedy motives to screw over the guy at the bottom. The Marxist can’t ever see their own greed even while theyre convinced anyone breathing deserves a high paying job as a birthright.

No, I reject moralism. Like I said repeatedly, these jobs are there to make a return for investors (not to reward people or punish them for the sake of being evil). For the investors this is “good” but for people living paycheck to paycheck, this arrangement is unsustainable.

Marxists think capitalism is destructive and self-contradictory, not “evil”. In fact Marx and Marxists think early capitalism was progressive compared to feudalism despite all its brutality.

But my main point here is simply that jobs are not rewards for those employed (or a reward for merit or skill), the only purpose they serve is to turn investment into return. Do you have a counter-argument or just ad hominem?

I didn’t have a child until I was 35 years old. It’s called birth control. The shit works. Either use condoms or have your partner use the pill.

As for working. I would rather education be subsidized in some way. Provide them with a liveable wage as long as they work 20 hours a week and go to school the rest and maintain good grades in a degree that offers value and has a probability of getting them a decent livable tc.

I was homeless trying to go to school. I slept in my car in Washington. Made it through a year and ended up just skipping all that self teaching and getting into the engineering life.

I don’t have some high tc. I only make 92k a year. But it’s enough to support myself and my kid.

92k easily puts you in top 15% of individual income. While that may seem low relative to the numbers you see here, it's quite high relative to the rest of the country. It's almost 4x as much as the OP's example.

Yeah. Sorry I’m speaking based on the assumption of Bay Area or Seattle. Situation. Children ultimately are not a requirement in life. I think people should just focus on career. Two people making 40k can support 1 child and live a modest life I think.

IMO, a person's salary should reflect the value they contribute to the company's bottom line. This is an easy job with no educational barriers that can be learned in a day. This just doesn't justify a high salary, no matter how badly I feel for their personal situation.

Cashiering (is that a word?) is a simple task that's easy to automate, and businesses will always go with the cheaper option. If we legislate that they be paid a living wage, we'll likely see more of them put out of work by machines. (Works with me, because I don't need a person judging me when I buy 8 candy bars).

The real answer here is that childcare should be nationally subsidized so that both parents can work. Almost every other first world country does this. It leads to better outcomes for both the parents and the children. And better outcomes means better workers and better workers mean more $$$ for everyone.

The way it should be is not the way it is. While it is an obvious mistake of a parent to miscalculate their capabilities, the mistake would be paid by kid. We want to live in healthy society without violence, criminal, homeless (you name it). Yet we penalize someone who has no voice in this situation by saying to his parents - you should think what you are doing...